


Ghost of You

by redsteele



Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Comic Book Science, Graphic depictions of violence - Freeform, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Non-Consensual Medical Experimentation, Non-Serum Steve Rogers/Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes | Shrinkyclinks, modern!Bucky, only a little bit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-22
Updated: 2017-08-22
Packaged: 2018-12-18 12:46:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11874771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redsteele/pseuds/redsteele
Summary: Bucky’s job was far from monotonous, but between his last mission being a complete bust and being taken off rotation for field work, he found himself with a lot more free time and little to do with it. But when strange events started to happen at SHIELD, he stumbled onto a conspiracy that could tear his whole world apart. Who was the man in the hospital gown that kept appearing out of nowhere? What was Shield hiding? And most importantly, who is Steve Rogers?





	Ghost of You

**Author's Note:**

> Ohhhh Boyyyyy!!!  
> Here we are. It's over. I don't really know what to say, to be honest. This fic has been a labor of blood, sweat, and tears. Thanks to the SBB mods who were super cool about me being a total mess and barely submitting stuff on time. Thank you to my artist (tsumi-noaru on tumblr) who has been super patient with me when it came to writing and made AMAZING ART FOR MY FIC. Also, HUGE shoutout to my bae-ta (buff-bucky on tumblr) who I literally would not have been able to do this without.  
> And as cheesy as it is, thank you to all of you! Thank you everyone who participated in the big bang, you've all been great and it's wonderful to see all the support you have for each other! Thank you to everyone reading this, it means a lot to me that people care enough to read my fic and to comment and everything.
> 
> So yeah, just a lot of 'thank you's.  
> If you wanna check out the trash bin that is my tumblr, I'm at shrinkyclink.tumblr.com

So far, the building looked like it had been abandoned for years. Dust covered every surface and hung in the air, making the place feel unreal. So far Bucky and Romanoff had found nothing; no people, no files, not even a footprint.

“Eastern sector clear, I’m heading South,” Bucky muttered into his comm. At that point, the only reason he was keeping his voice down was his sense of professionalism.

“I’m almost done sweeping the North,” Natasha replied.

Bucky stalked down the halls. He was pretty sure this whole op was a bust, the base had to have been abandoned for years. From the looks of it, someone went through and gutted all the equipment before they left, too.

By then he had fallen into a pattern. Go down the hall, slip through the door, sweep the room, and move on. Left side first, then the right, back and forth until all rooms in the hall were clear.

Fifteen minutes after their last check in, Romanoff radioed him.

“I’ve got something. Reinforced door with an analog lock. It sounds like there’s a machine running in the room and my EMF is picking up active DC current. What do you think?”

Bucky paused for a moment. They hadn’t run into any locked doors or machinery, active or otherwise. That had to be whatever was still draining power from the city’s grid, the whole reason they had come here . Honestly, he had been starting to think that Coulson had been given bad intel.

“I can finish this wing in ten minutes. Wait for me before going in.”

Natasha confirmed and the line went silent.

Now that they had found something, Bucky found himself paying more attention to his surroundings. After he finished his sweep and found nothing, he rendezvoused with Natasha.

“What’ve we got?” he asked as he jogged up to her.

“Reinforced steel, probably four inches thick. Lock seems simple enough, but I’m not sure about what’s on the other side.”

Bucky nodded. “I’ll cover you while you open it up.”

The sound of Natasha’s lock picks shifting the pins were deafening in the silence. Bucky took deep breaths, trying not to focus on how loud the noise of his lungs expanding and contracting felt in the quiet hall.

With a satisfying “click” the job was done and Natasha stood.

Bucky nodded when she looked to him, getting into position right outside the door and she reached for the handle.

She counted down from three with her fingers and opened the door. Bucky slipped inside, barely brushing against her arm, as his eyes cleared the area. No sign of hostiles or security measures. No movement at all.

Now that he had checked for threats, Bucky let himself relax a little as he took in the rooms contents. Dark, dusty, and empty except for a metal shelving unit in the corner.

As he moved further in Natasha followed. Once she had confirmed that there was no danger, she strode across the room to examine the shelves, Bucky only a step behind her.

The top two shelves were empty, but the second-to-bottom shelf had files scattered across it. The papers didn’t seem to be in any order.

Bucky picked up what looked to be a summary page and almost did a double take.

“1947,” he read aloud “these are from 1947. This place is bare, what are these doing here?”

“These are SSR documents too,” was Natasha’s response.

Bucky shuffled through a few more of the papers. All of them had the Strategic Scientific Reserve symbol printed at the top.

Bucky put the papers back and crouched down to check the bottom shelf.

It was occupied by a large metal pod, or storage unit of some kind. There was no reference to what it was or how to open it.

“This is what’s been using up electricity,” Nat confirmed with her EMF detector in hand. Bucky skimmed his fingers across the faint seam that ran horizontally on the pod, looking for some sort of clasp, or anything to indicate how to open it. He didn’t find one.

He stood back up and turned to Natasha, reaching for his radio with a question on his face.

She nodded. “Call it in.”

“Coulson, we’ve got a handful of SSR files and a metal container in the North sector. How should we proceed?”

After his message was confirmed, the line was silent for several minutes.

“Leave them and pull out. Strike Team Alpha’s going to secure the building. Reach extraction point in thirty.”

Bucky shared a look with Natasha. Alpha Strike? Why would they be called in to deal with an empty base and a few papers? Alpha was a spec ops team, not a cleanup crew. It didn’t make sense.

“You heard the man,” Natasha spoke after a moment of confused silence. “Let’s go.”

 

********

 

Strike Team Delta had been on missions almost nonstop for the last six months, so Bucky was glad to get a break.  He knew Nat and Clint were going on solo and partner missions, but he had a feeling Coulson could tell he was getting burnt out so he was put out of rotation for a while.  Bucky was relieved. He had been so busy those last few months that it felt like he didn’t have time to breath, but no field work meant he was stuck behind a desk, which meant paperwork.

Piles upon piles of paperwork.

Bucky had been a Sergeant. He was trained in fourteen different kinds of hand-to-hand combat. He was one of the best snipers in the world. His codename, the Winter Soldier, struck fear into the hearts of covert ops agents around the world.

He was also stuck filling out records on SHIELD’s catering budget, and how much ammo they go through a month.

Didn’t SHIELD have people for this? People who didn’t know a hundred ways to kill a man unarmed and were good at boring desk jobs?

At that point, he was sitting with his head on the desk wishing that he was getting shot at in Central America. At least out there no one asked him to file expense reports.

 

********

 

It began when the lights started to flicker. No one questioned it because no one knows what the tech department gets up to, and no one wants to ask. Entire floor shut down due to “technical issues”? Fine. Weird noises in the vents and a memo about robotic containment breaches? Perfectly normal. A computer virus that results in endless pop-up notifications? Just another Tuesday.

So flickering lights were par for the course. Computers shutting off, while frustrating, also emphasized the importance of saving your documents. None of it really bothered Bucky, so he made little note.

He was standing in a break room between meetings getting what had to be his hundredth cup of shitty coffee that day when the lights shut off. The hair on the back of his neck begin to rise.

The temperature plummeted. He was freezing cold so he held his lukewarm mug as close to his body as possible.

He became rapidly aware of how alone he was in the room. There was no one else there. The room became vacant, the tables became sterile, and the chairs became hopelessly empty. Was there even anyone else on this floor? He couldn’t remember, but it didn’t feel like it. He was by himself, surrounded by rooms upon rooms only defined by who wasn’t occupying them.

Then he heard a noise. It sounded like someone yelling, but he couldn’t make out the words. Was someone else there? Leaving his mug on a table he rushed to look out into the hallway. The shouting was getting louder but still unintelligible. He stepped out into the hallway when he heard footsteps. Someone was running toward him. Someone was running toward him and was about to crash into him and they were yelling and there was somebody there with him even though he was so completely alone and-

The lights flickered to life.

Bucky stood in the middle of the hallway outside of the break room where he had left his drink. He had been getting some coffee in-between meetings.

He walked back into the room and was met with a room full of chairs and tables. As he reached for his mug, he noticed his fingers trembling. He picked it up and held it close before walking toward the door.

He dumped the coffee in the sink on his way out. Bucky didn’t need any more caffeine.

After that it felt like he was being targeted. When the lights would spark and go out for a moment, he would hear footsteps when he was alone. The people around him began to wear their coats inside. Sometimes, he would see a figure reaching for him out of the corner of his eye. When he turned to face it, it was always gone.

Every once in awhile he would hear someone yelling in the distance. Whoever it was sounded like they needed help. It made him incredibly sad.

After a week of this he wasn’t sure what to do. Was he going crazy? Sure, weird things always happen at SHIELD, but Bucky was struggling to blame it all on his workplace. It didn’t feel like it was all in his head, though. The lights _were_ randomly going out, he wasn’t imagining that; the building had some cold spots too, that was just fact; and sometimes…

Sometimes things weren’t how he left them. Sometimes he left a paper on a desk and it was on the chair when he got back. Sometimes he found his phone was upside down on a table when he had left it right side up.

He started to feel like he was being watched, at times. He felt like there was someone breathing down his neck. It didn’t feel malicious, but more of an itching sensation. He was able to (mostly) write it off until he started to see things. That’s when it went beyond the standard SHIELD-weirdness he was used to.

 

********

 

If someone asked Bucky to run one more errand, he swore he would scream. Sure, he was still on mandatory probation from field ops, but that didn't make him into everyone's errand boy. If one more person tried to ask him to go get their coffee order, he couldn't be held responsible for his actions.

But, Maria Hill had asked him to grab a file out of archives, so that's what he did.

The Triskelion basement kind of freaked him out. It was an endless warehouse, a place where unneeded things were left to gather up dust. If ‘unneeded things’ meant SHIELD secrets and enough blackmail material to overthrow several governments

The archives were dark and cold and a complete pain in the ass to access. Hell, there were no light fixtures installed for some inane reason. So here Bucky was, armed with a flashlight and an overactive imagination (not paranoia, Natasha, as if she had a leg to stand on), tasked to find a needle in a haystack the size of the pacific ocean.

But, to give the people who were in charge down there some credit, Bucky had nothing but praise for the filing system.

He was looking for storage unit PR-073, some intel from an old op that Hill thought would be useful for something she was planning. Whatever it was for was above Bucky's pay grade, but he was just grabbing the file for her.

Bucky finally reached the PR- shelves. His flashlight lit up the containers labels as he passed them by. PR-004, PR-013, -018, -023... Some labels were nearly faded away. Some looked brand new.

He had reached PR-033 when his flashlight flickered. He stopped and shook it a little to make sure it wasn’t running out of battery life or something. It continued to shine, so he pointed it forward and continued walking ahead.

He hadn't even made it five steps before it flickered again, then burned out.

"Shit!" he muttered, shaking the damn thing in an attempt to revive it. Nothing happened.

"Shit!" Bucky repeated, louder. He slammed the flashlight onto the shelf he was stood next to. Hadn't he just changed the batteries? It shouldn't have burnt out like that.

He racked his brain. He vaguely remembered the path he took to get there. He might be able to make his way back...

Then what? Commandeer someone else’s flashlight and make the trek again? Make Hill wait even longer?

No, he couldn't go back now. He was almost there, no point in not grabbing the file she needed.

He kept one hand pressed against the shelf and the containers that sat on it and took a hesitant step forward. The ground didn't collapse from under him, so he figured he was safe.

He was right next to PR-035 when his light had died, so he counted up from there each time his hand skimmed across a new box. PR-039...045...056... 070...

A noise broke his concentration. Something was shuffling against the floor ahead of him. If he remembered correctly, this row ended at PR-80, so whatever it was had to be right in front of him.

Bucky's eyes had begun to adjust to the darkness by now, so when he strained them to look ahead, they were able to make out a humanoid shape sitting on the floor a few feet away from where the wall would be.

"Hey," he said quietly. Whoever it was showed no sign that they had heard him.

"Hello?" he called out, louder this time. Once again, no response.

Bucky was silent as he treaded forward, the figure becoming clearer as he approached them.

It seemed to be a man, or maybe a boy. He was thin, short, almost sickly-looking. He looked to be in a robe of some sort. Bucky could just make out limp, blond hair.

He started hearing soft, hiccuping breathing. The boy was crying. Right when he was about to call out again his flashlight turned back on, blinding him for a moment.

Once his sight readjusted he looked back to the boy, but there was just a concrete wall.

The boy was gone.

Could it have been Bucky’s imagination? Probably. He must’ve needed the break from the field more than he thought, if his work was starting to get to him like this.

Or maybe he was just losing it.

 

Later, as Bucky lay in his bed attempting to sleep, he realized that working at SHIELD had made him far too complacent about unexplained events and he was about to start freaking out. A lot of weird things had been happening recently and it was only now his brain had caught up.

He was fully prepared to have a total breakdown when his cellphone began to ring.

"This is Barnes."

No response came from the other end of the line.

"Hello?" he asked.

Nothing.

"Hello?" he repeated, beginning to feel irritated.

Another moment of silence.

He was just about to hang up when someone spoke.

"He-hello?" a deep voice came out of the speaker.

"Who is this?" Bucky asked. He didn't recognize the voice.

The person didn't answer.

He sighed in frustration and went to end the call.

"Wait! Please don't hang up," the person begged. Bucky's thumb was hovering over the button, unsure of what to do.

After a short pause, he moved his thumb away and brought the speaker back up to his ear.

"Can I help you?" he asked for lack of anything to say.

"I- uh. I just don't have anyone to call. Figured I'd just dial and hope for the best."

"You in holding or something?"

"What? No! I just... I'm in the hospital and I- uh- I don't really have anyone to talk to."

"So you just called a random number?" he asked, disbelieving.

“I- yeah. I did. Look, I’m sorry, it wasn’t my best idea, but I would really appreciate it if you would just. Indulge me?” the man sounded very unsure of himself.

Bucky sighed.

This was a terrible idea.

"Okay. I guess I should do this right, then. I'm Bucky," he gave his name as a peace offering.

The man almost sounded insulted when he asked, "What the hell kind of name is 'Bucky'?"

"My name, you punk," Bucky laughed.

"It's a nickname. My real name is James, but that's what my Grandad went by and my dad already had Jim, so my sister shortened my middle name from Buchanan to Bucky," he explained.

"Like the president?"

He chuckled again. "Yeah, like the president."

There was a pause as he waited for the man to speak up again.

"I'm Steve," the man said.

Bucky nodded despite the fact that Steve wouldn't be able to see it through the phone.

"So why're you calling strangers in the middle of the night, Steve?"

He could almost hear the shrug that Steve gave in answer to the question.

"Bored, I guess. I'm stuck and don't have anyone to talk to."

"Where are you?"

Steve didn't answer.

"You there?" he asked.

"...I am. I'm in the uh- the hospital?"

"You sure about that, pal?"

"Shut it, jerk," Steve grumbled.

Bucky could hear his lungs whistle as he breathed, so he figured the hospital made sense.

"You said you don't have anyone to call. No family or friends visit you?"

Almost immediately after asking, Bucky felt bad. ‘No one to call’ was pretty self explanatory.

"I don't know."

Bucky's breath caught and he managed to choke on his own spit for a moment. "You don't know?" he repeated.

"I don't remember," Steve's voice wavered.

Bucky immediately felt even more terrible about his prying.

"I'm- I don't know what to say," his voice was low. "I'm sorry, man. I can't begin to imagine what that's like."

"It's not a big problem, it's not like I know what I'm missing."

Bucky almost wanted to laugh. He wasn’t sure how to respond to that.

“I’m sorry,” Steve apologized again. “This is weird, right? This is really weird. I can just go-”

“Listen, man,” Bucky interrupted before Steve left. “I was awake anyway. I was just having a bit of a moment when you called and, uh,” he swallowed. “I’m not gonna turn away the company. I could use a distraction too.”

“As long as I’m not bothering you.”

He smiled. “Not at all.”

“Thank you. This is- it means a lot. Like I said, I don’t really have anyone right now, and- it means a lot,” Steve stumbled over his words, but Bucky could hear the sincerity in his voice.

“Well- I guess you have me right now.  Out of all random phone numbers to dial, you could’ve done worse.”

Steve chuckled. “I’m think I’m beginning to agree with you.”

 

These late-night talks became a regular occurrence. When Bucky was stuck at SHIELD, filling out mindless paperwork, he could always count on Steve to call and distract him. Steve seemed to have good timing when it came to when Bucky wasn’t busy..

There were things that they didn't talk about- like why Steve was in the hospital, how he lost his memory, what Bucky actually did for a living, and why they were both always awake at two in the morning- but they managed to hold conversation just fine while avoiding those topics. Bucky would tell stories about his adventures with Nat and Clint in DC and the general shenanigans that occurred in his workplace. Steve would talk about his memories as they came to him. He would talk about growing up poor (he couldn't remember where) with his mom (he couldn’t remember her name), being sick (he couldn’t remember why) and struggling in a world that was constantly against him.

Steve didn't talk all too much, he seemed much more comfortable listening to Bucky and adding his own dry remarks. He was a spitfire, too. Bucky laughed more during their conversations than he had in a long time.

Steve helped him get away from the stress of his work. It was nice, being able to just talk with someone. Things at SHIELD were looking up, too. The strange occurrences like the cold spots and the weird feelings stopped happening too. He probably had just needed a break.

But Steve-- he really did help.

 

********

 

“Alright, that’s it. Who is it.” Nat demanded during lunch one day.  She and Clint were in-between missions and decided to join him for shitty SHIELD cafeteria food.

Bucky was frozen mid-bite as he stared at her with wide eyes. He glanced over at Clint, who just shrugged.

“What?” he asked, his mouth still full.

“Who’ve you been seeing?” she demanded as he swallowed.

Bucky coughed as he choked on his bite of food. Clint patted his back sympathetically.

“What?” he repeated, his voice hoarse.

“Who have you been seeing?” she said slowly, as if he was a child. “Making time, going out, wine-ing and dining, making the beast with two backs, doing the horizontal tango-”

“I get it!” Bucky interrupted before she could go on anymore.

“So…?”

“No one? I haven’t gone out with anyone in ages, you know that.”

And she did. She had set him up on the last ‘date’ he had been, which had gone terribly.

Natasha raised an eyebrow, unimpressed. “You’ve had your ‘I got laid’ face on for _weeks_ now, don’t think I haven’t noticed. So, spill. Who is it?”

Bucky looked over to Clint for support.

“She’s not wrong. You’ve been acting like a complete dope. It’s sickening, really.”

 _Traitor_ he thought bitterly.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about” Bucky reiterated. “I haven’t been seeing anyone. I haven’t had _time_ to see anyone.”

It was clear Natasha didn’t believe him.

“I’m being serious,” he insisted.

Nat narrowed her eyes at him. “Fine.”

Bucky blew out a frustrated breath. She didn’t buy it, but at least she was off his back for now. Where she got these ideas, he had no clue.

The thing was, Natasha was over invested in Bucky’s love life. She enjoyed playing matchmaker, of course, but she also took way too much pleasure in grilling him for every detail. Bucky isn’t sure if it’s an ‘I don’t know how to have intimate relationships so I’m going to live vicariously through yours’ thing, or just a Natasha thing.

Probably a Natasha thing.

 

********

 

Bucky waited anxiously for the elevator to stop and the door to open to the medical floor. All Nat told him was that Clint was in the infirmary in a short text.

Natasha and Clint had been on a mission for a week, complete radio silence. Meanwhile, Bucky got to sit around with his thumbs up his ass waiting for his next assignment.

The elevator stopped its ascent with a minor jolt and the doors slid open. Bucky rushed down the halls to the room number Natasha had texted him. He stopped right outside the room, took a deep breath to prepare himself, and opened the door.

Natasha stood in the back of the room, arms crossed with an amused quirk of her eyebrow. Barton sat on the examination table being poked and prodded at by a doctor. He looked—perfectly fine. The only sign of injury was a brace on his wrist.

Clint sat up from his slouch when he noticed Bucky standing in the doorway.

“You called me in for this?” is all Bucky could say, feeling relief and exasperation at the same time.

“Idiot tripped and sprained his wrist trying to brace his fall,” Nat told him.

Clint gave Bucky a grin and a thumbs up, then winced and cradled his hand.

“So there were these guards, okay—“

“Barton, you tripped on a stack of bricks. The mission was over.”

Bucky threw his hands up in the air and marched back out of the room. Once he slammed the door, he ran a hand down his face and sighed. All of his friends were complete assholes. At this rate he was going to go gray before thirty-five.

The lights flickered above him. He glanced around the empty hallway.

Bucky could feel the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, as if he was being watched. The temperature seemed to drop as the lights sparked and went out. He tried to go back into the examination room, but the door had been locked.

He cursed.

“Nat? Clint?” he yelled, banging on the door.

He turned back around to face the hall.

What the fuck was going on?

A quick movement in the corner of his eye caught his attention. Was someone there? He took a careful step toward it.

The sound of glass breaking from behind made him jump and pivot around. There were no windows in the hallway, but the sound was too clear to have come from behind a door.

There were soft footsteps echoing down the hall. It seemed to be coming from just around the corner. Bucky took his time as he paced forward, trying to make as little noise as possible.

Could someone be attacking SHIELD? It would have to be an inside job to overload the power and shut down the back up generators. Who knew how many hostiles were in the building now that it was vulnerable. He had to get to the others before—

Bucky stopped in his tracks.

Someone stood in the middle of the hallway between him and the only light source. The person was facing away from him. They were small, thin. The light bathed their outline in a shining, golden glow, leaving the rest of them in darkness.

Bucky hadn’t realized he’d made a noise until the figure was turning to face him. The light briefly shone on a distinctly masculine face.

Their eyes met. Bucky wanted to back away, to run. He was stripped bare, left raw and exposed from just this man's gaze.

The man took a slow step forward. Bucky held his breath. He took another step, and it was only then Bucky noticed he was barefoot. He left bloody footprints behind him.

The man was now walking toward Bucky, and Bucky had no idea what to do. His pace kept getting faster. Soon the man broke out in a stumbling run, raising an arm and reaching toward Bucky. Bucky could only stand there, immobile. As he got closer the man’s form was more and more clear.

There was a medical tag on his wrist. The sides of his head were shorn. His eyes were wide, scared. He was deathly pale. His lips were nearly blue and as he got closer the temperature dropped even more.

His face was covered in dust except for where tears had washed it away. His mouth was moving frantically but no sound was coming out. By the time he reached Bucky he looked to be shouting, screaming.

Bucky was still frozen in place, unable to even brace himself for the impact of a body against his, but it never came. He waited a moment before opening his eyes. He hadn’t even realized he had closed them. Bright fluorescent lights made him wince. Once his vision adjusted he whipped his head around to look for the man, but he was gone. The footprints had disappeared and all the hallway lights were on. There was no sign that anything out of the ordinary had even occurred.

“There he is, the man of the hour!” a loud voice came from behind him. Bucky spun around in surprise, but it was only Clint and Natasha heading toward him.

“Ooh, Someone’s jumpy.”

Clint bumped Bucky’s shoulder with his own as he continued down the hall. Natasha followed him with a long-suffering expression but amused eyes.

Bucky let out the breath he had been holding and looked around one last time for any sign of the man he had seen before shoving his trembling hands in his pockets and following his friends down the hall.

  


"Weird stuff's been happening at work recently."

Steve hummed in acknowledgement.

"I mean, weird stuff is _always_ happening at work, but this feels different. It feels like it's been targeting me specifically, you know?" Bucky tried to explain.

"Not really."

"There's been these cold spots everywhere, and I've been hearing things that aren't there? Normally I would think I'm going crazy, but I've seen it affecting other people too. If I didn't know better, I would almost think..." Bucky laughed at himself.

"Think what?" Steve prompted.

It sounded ridiculous even in his head. He had no idea how to say it out loud, but he had watched enough shitty reality TV to know what cold spots, strange noises, and apparitions appearing out of nowhere meant.

"I would think that the building was haunted," he forced out before breaking out in mortified laughter. Who jumps straight to supernatural activity when weird shit happens as SHIELD all the time?

Surprisingly enough, Steve wasn't laughing.

"I don't know, Buck, sounds logical to me."

Bucky paused. He wasn't sure how to respond.

Steve chuckled, which built up to full-blown laughter.

"You shit," Bucky swore as he started laughing again too. "I thought you were serious, punk."

"Jerk," Steve said between hiccuping breaths. Bucky could hear the grin in his voice.

Bucky was on his back, sprawled across his bed with a smile on his face as he stared at the ceiling of his apartment. He was happy, which was a strange realization to come to.

It wasn’t that he had been unhappy before; he loved his family and his friends, and took pride in his work, but…

This was different. Being able to laugh with Steve was different, like pieces of a puzzle all coming together. Bucky had connected with this stranger on the phone quicker than anyone else, even Nat and Clint.

Thinking about how his friend was stuck in a hospital somewhere made something ache in Bucky’s chest.

“I know you don’t like talking about it,” he prefaced “but would you mind me asking where you’re staying, or when you think you’ll get out?”

He heard a sharp intake of breath on the other line.

“It’s not like I _need_ to know, of course! I was just wondering if you would, uh, ever maybe want to meet in person? Not that we have to! We’ve just been talking for awhile and I think you’re pretty cool, y’know? And I’ve been thinking ‘hey, this is someone I want to hang out with person’. Not that I don’t enjoy our calls! Spending time with someone is just different than a phone call, and I think that would be cool, and-”

“Bucky, I...” Steve cut off his increasingly panicked rambling.

Bucky held his breath as he waited for him to finish his thought.

“I have to go,” Steve whispered.

“Wait!”

Bucky didn’t know what he wanted to say, whether it was to explain himself more or to apologize, but it didn’t matter.

Steve had already hung up.

 

It had been a week since he talked to Steve. Bucky had tried to call him, but every time he would get a machine. _The number you have dialed is not a working number._

Hell, he didn’t even know Steve’s actual phone number. It came up as _private caller_ , and when he went through his call history, he couldn’t get an actual phone number, just the redial option.

It was pretty suspicious, if Bucky was being honest with himself, he just didn’t want to admit it. Who could blame for wanting this one thing untouched by the danger and paranoia of his job? Even if it meant ignoring the things that didn’t add up.

All the strange incidents stopped happening, too. No cold spots, no hearing things, nothing. It was almost unnerving to have things at SHIELD be so… average.

But it couldn’t last.

 

********

 

Alarms rang throughout the building. Lights were flashing, elevators stopped moving, and people were either arming themselves or panicking.

“What the hell is going on?” Bucky stopped an agent by the arm, he couldn’t remember her name, as she walked by. She talked rapidly into her earpiece before turning to face him. “We’ve got hostiles on the ground floor. SHIELD’s being attacked.”

She didn’t wait for him to respond before she pulled her arm out of his grip and jogged down the hall.

Bucky, being the trained covert ops agent he was, definitely did not stand there and gape for a few seconds afterward.

Cursing his moment of immobility, he tore down the hall. He only had a few minutes until the entire building went into lockdown and he would be trapped. He needed to get to the armory, or at least out of the basement levels. Lucky for him, not a lot of people were working on that level at the moment, so he didn’t have to worry about evacuating anyone else.

As he sprinted down the halls he tried to estimate how much time he had to get to the staircase. Less than two minutes, at most.

The halls were empty. The people who worked down there must have holed up in their offices to wait the emergency out. Most people down here weren’t trained for combat, the field agents tended to stay in the higher floors.

He turned the corner to see the stairwell door. He had to make it, he had to make it to the main floors so he could help coordinate with the others.

He was thirty feet away when he heard the telltale whine of the security doors beginning to activate.

He ran faster. He just needed to be able to turn the handle and push.

The heavy metal door was almost a third of the way down.

He didn’t even need the handle, as long as he had room to barrel through to the stairwell he would be fine.

The door was halfway down.

Right as Bucky ran into it, the door reached the ground with a heavy slam. He slammed his shoulder into it, yelling in frustration, but there was no point. He was trapped and there was no way for him to get out and help.

He gave the door one last pitiful kick and slumped against it. People upstairs were probably dying and he was stuck here, just sitting on his ass.

“Dammit!” he yelled, pounding his fists against the unforgiving metal.

The door didn’t respond.

He stood there trying to catch his breath as his chest emptied of anger and replaced it with failure.

The sound of heavy footsteps snapped him out of his reverie. Someone was coming down the stairwell. A lot of someones.

They weren’t trying to be quiet. By the weight of their steps and the sound of their movement, they were wearing heavy protective gear. Sloppy formation, but probably armed well-enough to make up for it.

The hostiles stopped all of the sudden. Bucky began to back up from the door.

It exploded and Bucky flew back. He put his arm up to protect his face but it was too late. White heat pressed up against his body. The impact of hitting the ground reverberated up his spine and to his head. His ears were ringing. His vision was blurry when he tried to open his eyes. Shapes moved through the smoke filled corridor.

His hearing was shifting. It sounded like the world was underwater. He pushed himself to his feet and tried to clear his vision. People were yelling around him.

He got his sight back and looked around. He was surrounded.

Lucky for him, they thought he was going to be an easy target by the way he was squinting and supporting himself against the wall. Even with the burning in his left arm, he was far from defenseless.

One masked intruder took a step forward and Bucky moved.

In a blink of an eye he had swept out the hostile’s leg and disarmed him. He held his newly acquired weapon in his right hand as he caught the falling enemy and lifted him with his left.

Pain shot out of his left arm, but he ignored it. The others began to shoot but he used the man’s body as a shield before pushing him towards them.

In the confusion of the moment, he fired. One man went down with a shout. He was about to take down another when his entire left side exploded in pain.

He staggered, and the asshole took another shot.

It was then that the world stopped. The men in front of him stopped firing. He clutched at the wounds in his left shoulder and looked up.

The man in the hospital gown stood between him and the shooters.

The shooters had no idea what to do, the man had appeared out of nowhere. Everyone was still for an eternity.

Someone fired.

The burning in his shoulder got impossibly worse.

“Don’t touch him!” a familiar voice yelled.

He was barely conscious when he heard a voice calling for him.

“Bucky!” His head registered the voice as Steve’s. How was Steve here? He was in the hospital somewhere far away. He didn’t want to talk to Bucky anymore.

He had to be hallucinating.

He opened his eyes to confirm but the man in the hospital gown was leaning over him and he was speaking in Steve’s voice.

“Oh, god, Bucky. Hold on, please, hold on,” the man with Steve’s voice begged.

“Steve?” he croaked and the man went silent. He tried to sit up but his body wouldn’t listen to him. Everything was hurting but it was far away.

Keeping his eyes open became too difficult. Staying present was hurting, but Steve was here, so it would be okay.

“No no no, don’t close your eyes, stay with me, Bucky, please, you gotta stay-“

Then there was nothing.

Natasha was with Hill trying to coordinate agents and resources when a new voice talked to her through the comms.

“-asha? Can you hear me? You’ve gotta help him, please, he’s hurt and his arm- it’s real bad. I can’t-“

“Who is this?” she hissed, turning away from Hill and taking a few steps back for some semblance of privacy. “How did you get access to this frequency?”

“It’s Bucky!”

“What?”

“Please, he’s hurt. He passed out and I can’t help to him.  There were these men and they shot him and he’s cold and I can’t do anything to help.”

“Who are you,” she demanded.

“Steve, I’m Steve.”

She paused. None of this made sense.

“Please, there’s no time to explain, he’s in sub-basement three right by the stairwell and he’s _dying_ ,” Steve begged. Natasha’s blood went cold.

“I’ll be right there.”

  
  


Bucky’s head became aware of one thing at a time. His body felt light. His mind felt fuzzy and crowded. He couldn’t see anything- why was it so dark?

He opened his eyes

Light filled his view. It burned as if he was staring directly into the sun. He felt like an overexposed photo, unable to process any detail.

He blinked to get rid of the overwhelming white, but was left with spots dancing in his vision.

He blinked again, then once more, until the spots disappeared and he was able to force his eyes to focus.

With his brain no longer solely concentrating on his sight, he began to process sensation from his body. He moaned as he was flooded with a burning feeling, mostly centered around one shoulder. All of his muscles ached terribly.

Bucky hadn’t realized he had closed his eyes until he peeled them back open. A white tile ceiling greeted him when he finally was able to interpret information from his eyes.

 _Hospital_ was the first coherent thought he had.

He tried to move his head to look around, but a burning pain shot through his side.

He struggled to stay conscious.

He thought he heard someone come in. He thought there was someone talking to him but he couldn’t hear what they said over the blood pounding in his ears.

He passed out.

 

The next time he woke up, he was much more aware of his surroundings. They had him on a strong morphine drip which made the pain feel distant, but it also made him groggy and pretty much incoherent. He thought Natasha and Clint visited him, Coulson too, but his memories were so fuzzy that he couldn’t be sure. He slept a lot, but the doctor assured him that was normal. They had to dig three bullets out of his shoulder and his left arm was burnt to hell from the explosion. He had caught a few glimpses of it when the nurses had to change his wrappings, but all he saw was raw flesh and what would eventually be terrible scarring.

For a moment he would feel sorry for the poor bastard who would have to livedeal with that before remembering that it was his own arm.

His Doctor, Helena Hayes, had mentioned physical therapy, but he hadn’t processed anything she said. He felt a bit bad about that, to be honest, but who could blame him? He was struggling to stay awake enough to hold basic conversation, much less talk about whatever was going to happen when he got out.

 

*********

 

He was actually having a decent day, if you didn’t count the fact that he was stuck in a hospital with a fucked up arm for an undetermined amount of time. Nat was visiting and he almost felt coherent.

He could also tell there was something she wasn’t telling him. Natasha didn’t have many tells. Most of the ones he had seen were calculated, used to throw people off, but something was bothering her. She was being _too_ careful, too unreadable. Most people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, but Bucky knew her well enough to see even the most minor of variation.

“What aren’t you telling me?” he asked once he got fed up with waiting.

She blinked in surprise. “I don’t know what you-”

“Natalia, that’s not going to work on me. Just spill.”

She pursed her lips and pulled something out of her bag on the floor. It was her laptop. She rolled his food tray next to the bed so she could set down the computer. He raised the head of the hospital bed so he was sitting up more.

“I got ahold of the security footage of the attack,” she pulled up a folder containing a single video. The cursor hovered over the file. “I think you should see it.”

She hesitated one moment more before clicking and opening it up, then sat down to watch his face as he reacted. The footage was paused.

He took a deep breathe and hit play.

 

The carnage was incredible, but Bucky couldn’t bring himself to look anywhere else. His shoulder throbbed as he watched himself get shot. The memory of the pain was almost enough to make him turn away.

The man in the hospital gown appeared between him and attackers, and everyone froze. There was a moment where nobody moved, until someone fired and Bucky watched himself drop to the ground. The rest of the assailants took that as their cue and followed suit.

The man disappeared in the blink of an eye. Bucky braced himself to watch as more shots ricocheted off the walls and hit his crumpled form, but they never did. The quality of the footage wasn’t fantastic, but it looked like the bullets were all suspended in the air.

The goons just stared, some of them even started to lower their weapons as they tried to process what they were seeing.

The man appeared again, this time almost on top of Bucky’s body, and he could tell it was all over.

Not even a second after he reappeared, the bullets were back in motion, except now they were flying in the opposite directions.

Metal tore through body armor and flesh. The squad dropped almost all at once, not even managing to fire off one last shot. They were dead before they even hit the ground.

The man crouched over Bucky’s body. His hands hovered over the injured shoulder, looking unsure of what to do. He seemed to be trying to wake Bucky. He got more and more frantic the longer he went without any response.

The fresh corpses trembled where they lay. The man closed his eyes and spoke more calmly as the bodies rose in the air.

He nodded to himself.

The bodies were almost touching the ceiling at that point, violently shaking.

The man reached toward Bucky’s body. He went to brush away the hair in Bucky’s face, but his hand just phased through Bucky’s skin. As he flinched back, the corpses burst into blood and viscera, coating the walls.

Bucky felt nauseous just looking at the black and white footage of it.

Without looking back to see the horrifying mess he had created, the man disappeared.

Natasha’s expression was gentle when she took the computer from his lap. “He told me to find you through my radio. That was what I found when I got there.”

Bucky just nodded, still trying to process what he had seen. Steve was the man that he had been seeing everywhere? And the way he had killed those people…

Bucky was no stranger to death, but he was shaken to his core by what he had just seen.

He barely registered Natasha leaving his room. A distant part of him was grateful, he didn’t want to have people around at the moment.

“I don’t regret it,” a familiar voice came from next to his bed. He turned his head to see the man in the hospital gown–Steve–sat in the plastic chair meant for visitors. He was looking down at the floor, avoiding Bucky’s eyes. “At least, stopping them. I don’t regret that.”

Bucky’s mouth went dry and he swallowed. He was unable to do anything but stare at the man who he had been becoming close to, who he had been becoming afraid of.

“How?” his raw throat almost didn’t let him get the word out.

Steve gave him a bitter smile. “I don’t know. I just… woke up one day. Can’t remember much. Don’t know how I got here or why-“ he raised his head and let his eyes lock with Bucky’s “-why I can do the things those things. I can barely control it, sometimes.”

He wrapped his arms around his stomach and curled into himself.

“For what it’s worth,” he said in a small voice “I’m sorry. I’m sorry that you’ve been seeing me everywhere, I’m sorry I lied to you, I’m sorry I stopped talking to you, and I’m sorry about what I did to those people. I didn’t– I couldn’t –“

Steve took a deep breath.

“I don’t always realize what I’m doing. “

“You saved my life,” Bucky spoke after a moment deliberation.

Steve looked up at him, then away. “Of course I did,” he whispered.

Bucky didn’t know how to respond to the brutal honesty of the statement. Silence hung between them.

“I could look for you,” Bucky offered. It felt inadequate after everything, but it was all he could think to do. “If you wanted.”

“I don’t know how much there is to find of me. I don’t even know where, or when I came from.”

“You never know. Public records go back a long time, and SHIELD is pretty thorough. I’m sure there’ll be something. Do you have a date or place you lived?”

Steve furrowed his brows as his gaze turned inward, searching for what scraps of information he could find.

“Brooklyn. After the market crash.”

The market crash? Could he mean-

“The Great Depression?” Bucky blurted out.

“The what?”

“The stock market crash in the 30s after the war. That’s when you were alive?”

Steve’s gaze went far away.

“I lived in a tenement with my ma. She was a nurse. Never had two nickels to rub together, but we managed. My ma, she…”

Steve came back to himself and swiped at his watering eyes. “She’s gotta be gone by now. Don’t remember,” his voice was hoarse. The bedside table began to quiver. Bucky wanted nothing more than to pull him out of the plastic chair and onto the hospital bed, but he didn’t have the strength or courage to do so.

“Steve-“ Bucky tried to reach out to give some semblance of comfort, but Steve vanished from the chair and reappeared standing right in front of it.

“It’s fine,” he said in a hard tone. “I’m fine.”

Bucky could see his fingertips trembling. He wondered who Steve was trying to convince, Bucky, or himself.

“I’ll find out what happened to her,” Bucky promised. He didn’t want Steve to go, but it was clear his friend wasn’t up for staying any longer.

Steve nodded stiffly before disappearing.

 

********

 

Nat had been keeping him company for about an hour. He kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for her to start interrogating him on what happened, but she hadn’t yet. She had just come in with her lunch, sat in the chair next to his bed, and told him he was an idiot. He decided that meant he had worried her.

“So I think you owe me an explanation.”

And there it was.

“What do you want to know?” he asked, resigned to his fate.

Nat arched an eyebrow. “What is there to know?”

Bucky started at the beginning. How since he had been taken off of the field rotation, he had been hearing and seeing things that couldn’t be there. How the man started appearing, not often, but enough to unnerve him. He skipped over the late-night phone calls with Steve, she already knew about those, and told her about the conversation they had after she had showed him the security footage from the attack.

“I’ve know about mutants and enhanced, but that goes beyond anything I’ve heard of.”

Bucky just shrugged. He was still on a morphine drip and his head was stuffed full of cotton. Figuring out how he felt about the whole situation was hard.

“You should report this. Someone may know what’s going on, they might be able to tell you-”

“I can’t do that, Nat. They’d think I’m losing it or worse, they’d try to- I don’t know, control him? Figure him out or something. It would be- I can’t do that to him. He’s my friend.”

She pursed her lips.

“I don’t like this, James.”

“I know, but. Natalia, please. You can’t report this. I don’t think I’m in any danger. He saved saved my life, for christ’s sake! I don’t want him to get hurt. I can’t do that to him.”

She nodded, but her face showed she wasn’t happy about it.

“Fine, I won’t tell anyone. But if something happens and he crosses a line-”

“He won’t-”

“-If he does, though, I’m going to Coulson. I won’t let you almost get yourself killed again.”

Bucky’s snorted and gave her an exaggerated grin. “Aw, Nat, that almost sounded like you care!”

She snorted and flipped her hair over her shoulder. “As if. I just don’t want to have to go through the trouble of breaking in a new team member.”

“Right,” he agreed, indulging her. All of the serious emotional talk was beginning to make him feel vulnerable, which meant that her feeling of discomfort was multiplied tenfold. Bucky was sure that the conversation wasn’t over, but they didn’t need to continue it right then.

 

Over the next few days the doctors lowered his pain medication dosage, which meant that he was less light headed and woozy. The trade off was that he was in hurting a lot more.

“Nat, please,” he begged “just end me. End the suffering.”

Natasha raised an eyebrow and looked at him with an amused expression.

“Suck it up, Barnes. I’ve seen you walk off worse things than this.”

He snorted.

His arm was fucked up and scarred beyond recognition. He would be able to gain back full mobility, according to Dr. Hayes.  Chances were he was going to be able to be back on the field, but that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be lasting damage.

He appreciated Nat’s attempt at levity. It was one of his favorite things about her, how when he really needed it, she wouldn’t pry. Most of the time.

She was a good friend like that.

“Could you at least get me my laptop or tablet or something? I’m dying of boredom.”

Which wasn’t untrue, Bucky had never done well with sitting around and doing nothing, but those things also had the advantage of being connected to the SHIELD intranet, meaning he could access SHIELD’s database.

He could start looking for Steve.

 

********

 

Bucky woke up in the middle of the night to a shaking figure standing next the hospital bed.

“What?” he muttered as his heart rate racked up and his eyes adjusted.

“Steve,” he breathed out a sigh of relief. There was no assassin here to finish him off, just his friend.

He squinted and took in Steve’s state of clear distress. “You okay?” he asked as his half-asleep mind tried to catch up with the situation.

“I-I’m f-f-f-fine,” Steve assured him. The effect was lost by how his body quaked and his teeth chattered. “J-just a b-bit c-c-cold.”

The medical room Bucky had been holed up in was kept pretty warm, but he wasn’t sure how things like temperature applied to Steve.

He had an idea, but… He wasn’t sure how Steve would react. Or if it was even possible, considering Steve’s current state.

He took another look at Steve’s face, how he wasn’t making eye contact and his lips were beginning to turn blue, and made a decision.

“Do you think you can stay solid right now?”

Steve blinked, surprised. “I- uh. I d-don’t know.”

Bucky nodded. “If you can, you can always come here and huddle for warmth with me,” he cracked a hesitant grin.

Steve’s shaking seemed to momentarily pause as he stared at Bucky. Shit, Bucky had screwed this up big time.

Bucky immediately started to backtrack. “I mean, me and my sisters used to share beds in the winter to stay warm, you don’t gotta if you don’t want to. I just thought that maybe it would help.”

He decided to shut up. He was sure if he could see himself, his cheeks would be bright red. He glanced at Steve’s face. His teeth were still clacking together, but he had his brow furrowed in a determined expression.

“Seriously, just forget I said anything.”

“Shut up and move over, jerk.”

Bucky stared at Steve for a moment before scooting to the right as quickly as his injuries would allow. He watched as Steve took a deep breath and reached out toward the bed with a trembling hand and expression of pure concentration on his face. He went to grab the sheet and-

He did it. He flipped the sheet and scrambled onto the hospital bed as quickly as he could, before his body would go back to passing through solid objects.

Bucky watched with a smile as Steve pulled the sheet back up and turned to lay his side, facing away from Bucky. He on the edge of the bed, as far as physically possible from where Bucky was lying.

His body was still shaking, but Bucky didn’t think it was quite as bad as before.

Well, that wouldn’t do at all.

“I said we were gonna huddle, punk,” he shifted closer and tugged his friend toward the middle of the bed. Before Steve could protest, Bucky pulled him into a tight embrace with his good arm held him close.

Steve’s skin felt ice cold, but was quickly warming from Bucky’s body heat so Bucky didn’t say anything. Steve was stiff as a board as they laid there in the dark.

“Relax, Steve,” Bucky whispered into the nape of his neck. “I’ve got ya’.”

Steve let out a stuttered breath and leaned back against Bucky a bit, letting go of some of the tension. His shaking was much less noticeable.

Bucky barely resisted the urge to bury his nose in Steve’s hair. He let Steve’s soft, slightly wheezing breaths lull him back to sleep.

 

********

 

“I found your mom,” was how Bucky greeted Steve when he appeared the next day. He had been researching on his SHIELD laptop, the one Nat had kindly retrieved for him, that morning. It had taken some time. Turns out, there were a lot of female nurses who lived in Brooklyn during the Great Depression, but he managed to narrow his search with the what details Steve had remembered and given him during their late-night phonecalls.

God, that felt like a lifetime ago.

It took a while, but Bucky had been able to manage it. At least, he thought he did. There was no way to be a hundred percent sure until Steve remembered, or at least recognized, the name he had found, but Bucky had high hopes.

“Really?”

It was the first time Bucky had ever seen Steve look excited. He had heard his voice filled with the emotion, but had never seen the look on his face. He was grateful to have that chance now.

“Yeah,” Bucky couldn’t help but to smile at him. “Sarah Rogers.”

“Sarah Rogers,” Steve repeated, his eyes glazed over. He seemed to be looking at something far away. His lips curled into a small smile. “That’s her.”

Bucky couldn’t look away from Steve’s, dare he say it, hopeful expression.

Steve sat down on his plastic chair. “Thank you, Buck. I- I honestly don’t know what to say.”

“No thanks needed, pal. I was happy to do it for you.”

Bucky couldn’t stop smiling. He just was grateful to be part of the reason for the smile on Steve’s face.

Bucky had been planning to mention that he had also tried to look for Steve himself, but with how grateful and happy Steve looked, he couldn’t make himself do it. He couldn’t tell Steve that he hadn’t been able to find anything about him in SHIELD’s database, not even when searching with what he had thought to be, and now knew for sure, Steve’s last name.

Steve Rogers. It fit.

Bucky was going to ask Steve to tell him more about his mom, though, when he noticed a lost, faraway look in Steve’s eyes. It was a stark contrast to the warmth that had just been there.

“Steve?” Bucky asked cautiously.

Steve flinched back at the sound of his name. "No no no no no no-" he grabbed his head and curled in on himself.

"Steve, what's going on?" Bucky reached out to touch him, but his fingers just passed through Steve's shoulder and he pulled them back.

"No, please, leave me alone," he begged. Steve slipped off the chair and onto his knees to his knees. Bucky tried to follow, put his IV kept him from going any further than leaning off the side of his bed.

"Steve?" he asked again, his hands hovering awkwardly around Steve's incorporeal form.

"Stop! Please, stop-" Steve was sobbing and clawing at his head.

"What's happening?" Bucky asked, trying to calm Steve down. It wasn't working.

Steve looked up, at Bucky, his swollen eyes wet and desperate. "It hurts, Bucky, oh god it hurts," he curled back in on himself. "Make it stop, please, make it stop. Please, help me."

"What hurts?" Bucky whispered, feeling terrified and helpless.

Steve's head shot up, and he stared with wet eyes toward the ceiling. He screamed.

"Steve!"

Steve's form flickered in front of Bucky's eyes. Bucky reached out to him, not knowing what he was trying to do but that he had to do something.

Steve disappeared leaving an empty silence behind.

 

********

 

It was a few days later. Bucky hadn’t seen Steve at all until then, Steve didn’t seem to remember what happened after he remembered his mother’s name, and Bucky was nervous about telling him. Bucky was worried about the way Steve had reacted to remembering. He was worried about how Steve would react to remembering again.

“Bucky?” Steve’s voice broke through their shared silence. He sat in his chair next to Bucky’s hospital bed, his knees curled up to his chest and his bare feet barely poking out from underneath the hospital gown he wore. The way he held his body made him look even smaller than he was.

Bucky gave him a smile. Honestly, he was just happy to see Steve still there.

Steve had trouble with silence; he tended to disappear in it. With nothing to concentrate on Steve faded away without realizing it. The fact that Steve was making the effort to be present and stay with Bucky made his heart warm.

Sometimes Bucky wondered where Steve went when it was quiet, but he had never built up the courage to ask.

“Yeah?” he responded.

Steve crossed his arms around his bent legs and gripped his hospital gown. His eyes kept flickering to Bucky, then immediately away. He shifted in his seat.

“I don’t think I’m real.”

Bucky sat up as much as his body would allow and stared at him. Somehow Steve managed to curl into himself even more under his gaze.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” was Bucky’s incredulous reply.

Steve took a deep breath.

“I’m not really here, am I? But I’m not dead.-” Bucky inhaled sharply at the thought of Steve having died. “-At least, I don’t think so, and sometimes I feel like…” Steve trailed off.

“Like what?” Bucky prompted.

“I feel like I’m somewhere else. I’m here, with you, but a part of me isn’t. I can touch things, but I can’t feel them. Sometimes I hear or feel things that aren’t there. I can move stuff, but my body isn’t the one moving it-“

“-Steve, stop.”

Bucky couldn’t stand to hear anymore. His fingers trembled as he looked at his friend. Steve looked frantic, wide-eyed and scared.

Steve was _scared_.

“Of course you’re real.” Steve looked away. “No, look at me. Steve, you’re real. You saved my life. I wouldn’t be here if you weren’t real, so- don’t. Just don’t.”

Steve pulled his bottom lip between his teeth and worried at it, but he didn’t look away.

“Of course you’re real,” Bucky repeated.

He leaned back settled back down onto his bed. Steve was silent, but he could that blue eyed gaze on him.

Neither of them spoke or moved for a long while after that. Bucky closed his eyes and let his breathing even out. Steve must’ve thought he was asleep.

“I only feel real around you,” he whispered. Before Bucky could turn his head and respond, he felt Steve leave. When he checked, just to make sure like he always did, the plastic chair was empty.

Bucky sighed deeply and ran his hand through his hair. He had vowed to figure out what was happening before Steve got any worse, but at this point he couldn’t do it alone. It was time to call in backup.

 

His Doctor said he was recovering well. He had been attending daily physical therapy for a few weeks before they decided to release him.

“You’re coming in twice a week for your PT appointments, and once a week for a general checkup to make sure everything’s healing properly,” Dr. Hayes’s tone brook no argument.

“Yes ma’am.” Bucky had to resist the urge to salute.

“No strenuous activity, don’t lift anything above twenty-five pounds, and do your stretches after you wake up and before you go to sleep everyday. If you experience heightened pain or anything out of the ordinary, you call me immediately. Agent Romanoff will be taking you home.”

He nodded. Doctor Hayes must’ve deemed his response acceptable because she nodded in kind and exited, passing by Nat as she came in.

“You ready to go?” she asked as she swept up the duffel bag full of his belongings. He glanced around and gave an affirmative.

Bucky trailed behind her as she marched out of the room, lingering in the doorway.

He looked back, hoping to see a familiar set of blue eyes and golden hair, but was disappointed when no one was there.

Bucky sighed and followed Natasha out of the room.

 

Before going back to his “sad, lonely apartment” (Nat’s words, not his) the spy decided that he needed to eat some real food.

“Hospital food doesn’t count, it’s just newspaper and mush.”

They were eating in silence at the greasiest burger joint that Nat knew of. Bucky was taking his time, picking at his order, but Nat took immense pleasure in being as much of a slob possible.

When she was finished she would still look perfectly put together, and he hated her a little bit for that.

“Nat, I’m cashing in a favor.”

She blinked slowly, swallowed her bite, and set her burger down onto her plate.

“Are you sure?”

Bucky nodded. “I need everything you can find on Steve Rogers. I’ve tried but-- I couldn’t find anything.”

“James, I don’t know-”

“Natalia, Please. I wouldn’t be asking if it wasn’t important. I need that file.”

She searched his face for something. She must’ve found it because she nodded. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

He barked out a laugh and ran a hand down his face. “Me too, Nat. Me too.”

 

It didn’t take her nearly as long as Bucky had expected to get back to him. It was only a few days later that he got a phone call, right after he got home from his physical therapy appointment. He was sore and exhausted, emotionally and physically, but he still picked up during the first ring.

“Meet me in half an hour, I’m texting you the address.”

She hung up before he could respond and almost immediately, a notification lit up his phone.

  


Bucky had been waiting at the Starbucks for fifteen minutes. At the ten minute mark, he felt bad about loitering and bought himself a latte and a scone. It felt like everyone in the room was staring at him, but that was just paranoia. He tightened his grip on his backpack anyway.

Nat slipped into the seat across from him and tossed the file across the table without a word. She slouched back into her seat and gazed about the room. To the untrained eye, she was lounging comfortably, almost lazily, but Bucky knew better.

“Did you read it?” he asked instead of picking the file up. It was inconspicuous, void of any labels to identify it. Natasha must’ve changed folders.

She turned back to face him. “No.”

He was genuinely surprised, Nat made it her business to know everyone else’s. It must’ve shown on his face because she raised an eyebrow and used her index finger to push it closer to him.

“But, considering how classified it was, you might want to reconsider. Someone went through a lot of trouble to bury it, and whoever did it had the clearance to make it look like it never existed”

He stared down at the papers in front of him, slowly reaching to take them. Only someone high up the chain had the clearance to make something like this disappear. But why would they bother burying files from almost a century ago? What was so important, so confidential, that even Natasha was hesitant to know what was inside?

“I’ll be careful,” he told her instead of voicing his questions.

“That’s not what I meant”

Bucky looked up at her, then away. “I know.”

He placed the blank manila folder in his backpack and went to stand when Nat spoke again.

“Why this, of all things?” she asked, finally voicing the question she’d been asking with her carefully chosen words and calculated looks since the beginning.

Bucky swallowed. When he was stuck in medical, Steve had been remembering more everyday; little things. Before the war, he had been constantly sick. He had worked with a brown-haired woman after he volunteered. A German scientist helped him get into the army. All of the guys he trained with would sabotage him. The experiment, whatever it was, hurt more than anything he had ever felt-

Steve was remembering more, but he couldn’t remember what had happened. He couldn’t remember if the experiment succeeded, he couldn’t even remember what the injections were for.

Bucky looked back at Natasha, once again seeing the question on her face. He grasped his backpack tighter in his hand.

         “I need to know what happened to him.”

She nodded as if that was the answer she had been expecting. “Be careful, Barnes. You might not want to pull on that thread.”

He clenched his jaw and walked away. They both knew he was going to do it no matter what she said.

“You found it.”

Bucky jumped when he heard Steve’s voice come from behind him. He was sitting in the archives staring at the file, right where they had agreed to meet on the phone the night before. Bucky had thought ahead and had brought a camping light he borrowed from SHIELD.

“Nat found it,” he corrected, shifting it off of his lap and onto the floor.

Steve silently stepped closer until he was standing right next to Bucky. He looked down at the papers with a blank expression.

“Have you looked at any of it?”

Bucky looked away from Steve and the file, feeling guilty. “A bit.”

“How much did you see?”

Bucky closed his eyes and saw the reports burned into his eyelids. He clenched and unclenched his fist, swallowing back his emotion. “Enough.”

His voice was noticeably hoarse but Steve didn’t pay it any mind.

Steve sat on the hard concrete floor next to Bucky. He reached for the file.

His fingers passed through and he cursed.

“I can-“ Bucky began to move his hand toward it to help.

“I’ve got it,” Steve snapped in frustration. Bucky put his hand back down.

Steve furrowed his brow and tried again, this time managing to make contact. He pulled the file into his lap.

Bucky watched in silence and as Steve’s hands hovered over it. He wanted to ask what was wrong, but knew that Steve would say something on his own. Asking would just make him feel worse.

“What if-“ Steve cut himself off before taking a deep breath. “What if I don’t remember any of it. What if it doesn’t come back,” he whispered.

Bucky reached for Steve, making sure to telegraph his movements so that Steve could make himself solid. He put his hand on Steve’s shoulder.

“At least you’ll know.”

Steve nodded.

Bucky gripped his shoulder a bit harder before standing up and moving to give him space.

He could see Steve tense up to steel himself for what he was about to do.

Steve opened it up to the first page.

Bucky didn’t leave Steve- couldn’t, really.

Just because he had to do this own his own didn’t mean he had to be alone while he did it.

Bucky stood and watched as Steve carefully read every page. It didn’t take too long, the file was pretty sparse from the little Bucky had looked over, but hopefully it would be enough to trigger some memories.

Steve was maybe halfway through when his hands began to tremble.

By the time he was done they were shaking. When he closed the file he gripped his arms to his body and sat there, staring at the papers in his lap.

Nothing happened for a few minutes. Bucky worried in the stillness and the silence.

Steve spoke right before Bucky was about to.

“There was this doctor… He was the only one willing to give me a chance. I had tried enlisting over and over again, but. No one took me. Too many health problems. Too weak.”

Steve curled in on himself even more.

“But the doctor, Erskine, he gave me a chance.

“It was this big top secret experiment. They could take men and make them stronger. At least, that was the idea. One person picked out of a group of candidates. Somehow, I was chosen.”

The temperature dropped. Bucky took a few steps closer.

“There was this big machine. I was supposed to get inside it, and they would give me the injections, and that would be it. It was supposed to fix me.”

The camp light flickered rapidly. Bucky knelt down next to him. His breathing got heavy and labored.

“There was this white light and the injections and it _burned_ , it hurt so much-”

He cut himself off.

“I don’t think it worked, not how they meant for it to. I think I was supposed to get bigger? Stronger? Healthier, at least. But I didn’t. I was exactly the same as when I went in, so they took me away to do tests and after a while they found _something_ but I don’t know what it was and they kept trying to make me _use it_ and I didn’t want to- they were scared of it, of me, and they wanted to control it but they couldn’t and then it got _so cold_ -”

Steve stopped himself as he began to hyperventilate. Bucky tried to put his arms around him but they just passed through. It was getting colder. Something fell from the shelves. The lamp was rapidly blinking.

“Steve,” Bucky tried to get through to him. “Steve!”

Steve couldn’t hear him. He was sobbing, now, sobbing and hyperventilating and the room was getting colder and the light was flashing and things were falling and Bucky couldn’t even touch him.

Steve’s form flickered as his entire body convulsed. What had started as whimpers and sobs were building up into heart wrenching shouts of pain.

“Don’t touch me!” he screamed. He was rocking back in forth, his head tucked as close to his body as possible as his nails dug into his skin. “Stop! Get away from me!”

Steve’s form was flickering as frantically as the light and Bucky was completely and utterly helpless to do anything but watch.

“Leave me alone!” he begged.

“Steve!” he yelled again. “Steve, it’s not real! You’re with me!”

The metal shelves around trembled and shook, the screws keeping them bolted in the ground groaning. Bucky could see his own breath.

“Steve!”

The bulb in the lamp shattered. Bucky blindly reached out for him.

Everything was completely still. Bucky could feel tracks of tears running down his face. He didn’t know when he had started crying but he let out a hiccupping sob. It was so cold.

“Steve?” he whispered. His voice was desperate and wet.

His eyes adjusted to the darkness. The file lay on the ground in front of him. Steve was gone.

 

Bucky was back at SHIELD. He wasn’t allowed to do field work, but there was always something to do, whether it was paperwork, planning ops, or training new agents. It also meant he had access to SHIELD files. What Nat had found was useful, but he wanted to do his own digging as well. Especially now that he had more information to work with.

He hadn’t heard from Steve in two weeks. Bucky had tried to find him, going back down to the archives, going to the medical wing. He was even desperate enough to ask for help from Nat. But they had found nothing.

Bucky was beyond worried at this point.

During his lunch, instead of eating in the cafeteria, he made his way down to the archive computers to do some research.

**Keyword: Erskine**

**1238 Results Found**

**Keyword: Erskine 1945**

**198 Results Found**

Much more manageable.

**Keyword 1: Erskine 1945**

**Keyword 2: Rogers, Steve**

**0 Results Found**

 

Nat was right, it didn’t make sense. If Steve had been involved with the SSR, there should be _something_ in the SHIELD database that at least mentioned him.

 

**Keyword: Project Rebirth**

**37 Results Found**

 

He went to open the first file listed.

 

**Project Rebirth (PR-76-45)- File Not Found**

 

Bucky was confused. The file index showed there was an entry. He clicked on the next one.

 

**Project Rebirth (PR-76-46)- File Not Found**

 

It would be one thing if he didn’t have the security clearance to access it, that was fairly common when it came to working at SHIELD, but having a document completely inaccessible? That was out of the ordinary.

 

“Barnes!” someone barked from behind him. Bucky almost jumped out of his seat, cursing himself for not hearing the person walking in.

It was Rumlow, leader of Strike Team Alpha.

“Yeah?”

“Get up. Secretary Pierce wants to talk to you.”

Rumlow acted as if this was a normal situation. That the Secretary of the _World Security Council_ , the only man in the building who could possibly have higher authority than Director Fury, would ask to meet with a field agent.

“He wants to see you now, Barnes,” Rumlow warned. Bucky jolted back into the present and stood, his mind racing.

Was the timing a coincidence? He had just been looking up things about Steve, could Pierce have been tracking that? Did Pierce know about Steve? Why in the hell would he want to meet with Bucky out of all people. Did he want to help? Did he think something about the situation strange too?

The elevator ride was hell. Rumlow barely even acknowledged him, leaving Bucky to overthink all possibilities. Why the hell was it taking so long? Probably because Pierce’s office was on the top floor, because he was one of the most important men in the building. Pierce had been working for SHIELD longer than Bucky had been alive.

The elevator stopped and Rumlow strode out, not even looking back to see if Bucky was following.

He stopped outside a set of important-looking doors and motioned his hand.

“In there. Don’t keep him waiting.”

Bucky took a deep breath and walked through.

  


Bucky stood at parade rest, staring resolutely out the giant windows. If Natasha was right, and someone really did bury Steve’s file on purpose, he couldn’t give anything away.

And Nat was almost always right.

Pierce poured himself a drink before turning to Bucky.

“Relax, please. It makes my muscles ache just to look at you,” he said. Bucky forced himself to change his posture. He had to look casual, he had to look like he didn’t know anything.

“Barnes, James Buchanan,” he announced. Bucky glanced over to see him reading a giant projection of Bucky’s own file.

“Recruited out of the Army at the rank of Sergeant. Trained sniper and covert operative. Part of Strike Team Delta. An essential asset during missions in Somalia, Latvia, and Czechoslovakia. Excellent sharp-shooter, proficient in multiple languages, specializes in reconnaissance missions and-“

He turned to face Bucky with a small smile. Bucky began to feel nauseous. “You get the picture.”

“I have to say, when the report came in that you have been accessing some old SHIELD records, I was surprised,” Pierce had moved to stand next to him. Their eyes met in the reflection of the glass. He still had that phony smile on his face. “So, what’s a soldier like you digging into World War Two files for?”

Bucky gave a smile just as fake as Pierce’s own. “Would you believe me if I said I was an amateur historian?”

He chuckled and walked toward his desk. “No, I wouldn’t.”

Bucky could feel Pierce watching him. He knew he was being analyzed. Any mistake here and it was all over. He couldn’t mess this up, he couldn’t let Steve down.

“Someone might get the wrong idea when they see your name come up where it doesn’t belong,” Pierce warned. Bucky suppressed a shiver. “Agent Romanoff’s too. I would be careful.”

Bucky heard the same words spoken by Natasha echo in his head.

“Of course, sir.”

Pierce gave him a once over and nodded. Bucky took it for the dismissal it was.

 

“How did it go?” Natasha didn’t act like she had been waiting for him at his desk, her casual posture didn’t show any impatience, but there was a tightness around her eyes that gave her away.

“He said I should be careful about what files I look at because someone might get the wrong idea,” he quoted to the best of his memory. “And that you need to be careful too.”

The whole experience felt unreal. His head felt like it was floating. He had just been threatened by a member of the World Security Council.

Her face slipped into a cheshire-grin as if she hadn’t heard better news all day.

Bucky collapsed into his chair and dropped his head onto his desk. His body was crashing from the adrenaline rush of standing in the same room as one of the most powerful men in the country.

“What’re you so happy about?” he grumbled.

“Pierce just gave himself away.”

“What?”

“Not here. Come on, we’re taking lunch.”

 

“He’s hiding something, has to be. He wouldn’t go through the trouble of telling you to back off if we weren’t close to finding something.”

Natasha was almost giddy. She was dressed as a civilian. Her disguise was practically unrecognizable, down to the way she obnoxiously popped her bubblegum.

Actually, Natasha would probably do that anyway. She seemed to get a ridiculous amount of joy from being insufferable.

“So now we know how high up this goes, so what? We still have no real idea of what’s going on, or why. Just that Steve is involved, somehow, and Pierce doesn’t want us to find out. We can’t take this to anyone at SHIELD. Who can we trust?”

Natasha bit her lip and worried at it. “I know someone who can help us.”

 

********

 

“Romanoff!” Tony Stark walked into with his arm wide out as if he was going to give Natasha a hug. “You don’t call, you don’t write. A guy could get the impression you don’t like him, you know?”

Stark put his arms down when he noticed Bucky’s presence. “And who’s this? You’re bringing your boyfriend to meet the parents? Because I can tell you now, I am not fit to be a father figure.”

Natasha rolled her eyes.

“Also, Pepper would kill me,” he added as an afterthought.

Bucky took a deep, steadying breath. This was going to be interesting.

“We need you to verify some information for us,” Natasha said as she sat down on the large, white couch. Bucky followed her. “If we’re correct we can’t trust anyone at SHIELD.”

Stark’s slight smirk fell. “So we’re jumping right to it, then,” he sighed. He pulled up an arm chair so he could sit across from them.

“SHIELD’s compromised. We don’t know how far up it goes, but,” she glanced at Bucky “it could go as far up as Secretary Pierce, even the World Council.”

Stark stared at them for a moment, then blinked. “What makes you think that? I mean, I’m far from being SHIELD’s number one fan, but that’s a pretty serious accusation.”

“There are reports with missing information. Strike Teams deployed where they have no business to be. And Barnes’ friend,” she motioned her head to Bucky “Rogers, disappeared recently after we found some information about his involvement with SHIELD. When we went digging, we found nothing on him. Not even a birth certificate. The files I managed to find were buried so deep that it couldn’t have been on accident. I tried to follow the trail from there, but someone did not want this to be found.”

She held out the flash drive. “I know you have backdoors into the SHIELD system. All the evidence we have is on that drive, but it’s not enough. Something’s been going on at SHIELD, and Rogers is the key.”

There wasn’t much they could do, after that. It was mostly sitting back and letting Stark do the work. Or rather, letting JARVIS do the work.

Bucky had almost jumped out of his skin when a disembodied voice came from above, but Stark assured him it was normal.

“Oh don’t mind him,  he’s just grumpy when I don’t introduce him properly. That’s JARVIS, my AI and personal assistant,” Stark bragged.

“So he’s a computer?” Bucky asked. Stark looked comically affronted.

“A computer? Calling JARVIS a computer is like calling a nuclear warhead a water balloon. Completely undermines the purpose. JARVIS  is more than a computer, he’s an intelligent learning system.”

“So… he’s a really smart computer?” he asked, just to get on Stark’s nerves.

Stark didn’t disappoint when he spluttered in offended shock, before wagging his finger in Bucky’s face. “I invite you into my tower, my _home-_ ”

“We just walked in through the front door, you didn’t really invite us.”

Stark raised his voice and continued as if Bucky hadn’t spoken. “-Into _my home_ out of the kindness of my heart, and this is the thanks I get? If I weren’t trying to be the bigger man here-”

“We’re on a bit of a sensitive schedule, Stark. You can lecture James later,” Natasha drawled.

Bucky tried to hold back a smug grin, but probably failed.

“Yes, yes,”  he waved her off. “JARVIS?”

“Yes, sir?”

“SHIELD files, Steve Rogers. Cross reference the information on Widow’s flash drive, that should narrow it down. Oh, and order some pizza. I could use a pizza. Order a large meat lover’s from that place I like, you know the one. Do you two like meat lover’s?”

Before either of them could respond he barreled on.

“Of course you do, who doesn’t love meat lovers? Well, Pepper doesn’t. JARVIS, make that a large meat lovers and a vegetable. And tell Pepper that we have pizza, when it arrives. Oh, and guests. Pizza and guests. Do the renegade agents want anything else?”

Bucky shook his head. He assumed Nat did the same.

“Okay, that’ll be it, then.”

 

So that’s how Bucky met Stark.

 

A few hours later, JARVIS announced he had found something. When Stark handed Natasha and him a tablet with what he had been able to dig up, Bucky had no idea what to expect.

What he got was pages upon pages of reports, both old and new, made up of more black censor bars than text. Bucky’s self-given task of finding his friend had never seemed quite as impossible as it did then.

He tried to read them through, but he ended up skimmed it them all. Bucky was finding it hard to focus on the words in front of him until a familiar symbol caught his eye.

“What the hell?” He zoomed in to get a better look. It looked like a stamp up in the corner of a medical report from two months before. A skull with tentacles spread out around it surrounded by a circle. It was printed in red ink.

A wave of a nausea spread through his body as he frantically went back through all of Stark’s files and looked for the insignia. There it was, in the corner, over and over again.  Not every single page had the stamp, but it showed up enough for that nauseous feeling to build.

“HYDRA,” he whispered.

“What?” Nat leaned over to see his tablet screen. Bucky heard the almost imperceptible hitch in her breath that confirmed his fears.

“This is impossible,” his voice was hoarse. “HYDRA’s been gone for almost seventy years. Someone has to have been playing a joke.”

He looked up at Stark who was fiddling with his hands nervously.

“No joke. I checked and triple checked, that symbol is spread throughout SHIELD files. Most of them are above even Fury’s paygrade.”

Bucky shook his head in disbelief.

“That’s impossible, SHIELD would’ve stopped this.” Nat was visibly shaken.

“There are files like this dating back to 1945, SHIELD was built like this.”

But a symbol wasn’t enough; at least, not to find Steve. Bucky went back to scouring through the files for something -anything- that would help. They needed the unredacted files, they needed to know where Steve was, they needed-

Bucky’s mind went almost completely blank when he recognized one of the headings. SSR, 1947. File ID PR-76 stamped across the top.

“Nat,” he whispered. “Nat, we found him.”

“I know, James, that’s why we’re-”

“No,” he stopped her short. “I mean, we’re the ones that found these files. That last op we went on, the one Coulson called a bust. We were the one who found these files.”

He couldn’t believe it. He didn’t want to believe it.

“They called in Strike Team Alpha to secure the building, remember? Someone must’ve had an idea of what we would find, and when we did, they sent in Strike to secure it.”

His voice was getting progressively louder and more frantic as he went on. He jumped up onto his feet and began to pace.

“He was there, Nat! He was there the whole time, and _we_ were the ones who found him. We found him and didn’t even realize it. There was no terrorist cell, it was just a cover! Then however he was- was- stored, or whatever, that’s what Strike went in for! HYDRA wanted to find him, they…

“That metal pod we found. That container, it was using up power, remember? It must’ve been keeping him alive. Natasha, we _found_ him.

“They’ve had him for _months_.”

Bucky was totally defeated as he collapsed back into Stark’s couch.

“And I didn’t do _anything_.”

His voice was wet. He aggressively wiped his face.

Bucky startled when he felt Natasha’s fingers brush his arm.

“There was nothing you could do, James. No way you could’ve known. You did all you could with the information you had.”

“I could’ve done more,” he protested. “I could’ve dug deeper, found more instead of just-”

“You didn’t know!” she snapped. His mouth clamped shut in surprise. “Feeling guilty isn’t going to help anyone, especially not Steve. There’s no one who’s qualified for this. Steve didn’t remember anything, and you only had what he told you. But we have a better idea of the situation now. We can figure out what’s going on, and where he is. We’re not leaving him, but you need to pull yourself together.”

Bucky nodded and he wiped at his eyes.

“I know. You’re right,” he conceded, his voice rough. “This isn’t helping anything.”

He looked up at Stark who had been standing to the side looking uncomfortable at the emotional display.

“What do we need to do to help him?”

Stark loosened his posture and grinned. “I thought you would never ask.”

  


“Some of the files from the 50s and 60s looked familiar, so I crossed referenced them with some of the stuff my dear old dad left.” Stark pulled up a large blueprint of what looked like a rounded metal coffin. “This is what your boy was stored in. Cryofrozen, to be exact. Howard designed it specifically for Project Rebirth in the early 50s.”

_“I-I’m f-f-f-fine,” Steve had said. He was shivering and his lips were tinted blue. “J-just a b-bit c-c-cold.”_

“That’s what was causing the power drainage in the base you two raided; his Cryo-Unit was still hooked up to the grid. If it hadn’t been, he might not’ve made it for this long.”

Bucky’s knuckles were white where his fists rested on the table. They had _frozen_ Steve.

“Apparently he we was too volatile. The SSR couldn’t figure out a way to contain him. Even when he slept, his abilities- whatever they were, none of the reports really described them- were still active. The plan was to put him in stasis until they could figure out a safe way to restrict his powers and run tests, but it looks they never found one. The people who worked on him retired. They must’ve forgotten about him.”

Christ, they had frozen Steve. Froze him, and just forgot about him.

 

There was a recording buried among the files labeled MCARTER-PR-45.

It was the only audio file they had. The very beginning of the file was corrupted, but the majority was fine.

“-Can you explain the incident for us, Agent Carter?” A man asked. Someone else in the recording took a deep breath.

“In 1945 german scientist named Erskine worked with the SSR,” a woman spoke. “He had been developing the serum that deformed the Red Skull and gave him superhuman abilities. Dr. Erskine fled Germany and was granted Allied protection on one condition. He had to continue his work on the supersoldier serum for the SSR.

“Steve Rogers was one out of a group of candidates for the serum, and the only one who had been handpicked by Erskine.

“He was the candidate who was chosen for the final experiment. He was administered the serum, but it failed. No physical changes occurred and there was no effect on his health issues, positive or negative.

“We had been running tests on him for months when a HYDRA agent shot Dr. Erskine. Steve- Private Rogers and I were in the room when it happened, and he…

“You have to understand, there was no indication that the serum had affected him in any way. He had been prepared for release from SSR custody, he was supposed to begin field medic training the next week, but-

“-When he realized Dr. Erskine had been shot, he- it was unlike anything I had ever seen before. Whatever the serum had done wasn’t physiological, and there hadn’t been any noticeable incidences until then.

“Things started to fly around the room-desks, chairs, lamps, everything. At first I thought it was part of the HYDRA attack, but the assassin was thrown across the room and knocked unconscious. I was trying to get people to safety when the screaming started. The lights began to flicker and it was suddenly freezing cold in the middle of July. I looked around for Private Rogers.

“He was by the Doctor’s body and curled in on himself like a child. He was the one who was screaming. All of the objects flying around the room seemed to circle the two of them, and I realized he must’ve been the source. I think whatever was happening was hurting him, too.

“I tried to talk to him, get through to him somehow, but I don’t know if he even heard me. I attempted to get closer but he started standing up. All of the debris just… stopped. They hung suspended in the air as he stood. He turned around and looked at me. Then he fainted.

“Everything hit the floor as he did. The temperature returned to how it was before, and every light bulb in the room exploded at once. The whole room- floor, the walls, and even the ceiling- was a ripped up mess except for where Private Rogers and Dr. Erskine were laying.

“I immediately called for backup and medical attention for Private Rogers-”

Bucky stopped the playback.

“That’s impossible,” Stark started. “Even with enhancements, a person can’t _control_ -”

“I’ve seen it,” Bucky’s voice was rough. He was trying his hardest not to think about what the woman had been saying. _He was by the Doctor’s body and curled in on himself like a child. He was the one who was screaming… I think whatever was happening was hurting him-_

“All of it- he can do all of it. I’ve seen it,” he repeated.

“James-” Natasha started to stand and reach for him but he jerked away.

“No! Don’t, just. Don’t, Nat,” his breath was ragged. “I need- I need a minute. Please. Just, let me be alone for a minute.”

He walked out of the room feeling two pairs of eyes on his back, but the woman’s voice in his head was much louder.

_He was the one who was screaming… whatever was happening was hurting him… then he fainted…_

Bucky had no idea where he was going, he just continued to move forward until the hallway ended in a door. He burst through it to see an empty stairwell.

He collapsed on the floor next to the stairwell. He dug his hands into his hair and gripped it as hard as he could. His breaths were uneven. All he could hear was the woman, and Steve.

_Don’t touch me! Stop! Get away from me! Leave me alone!_

_-they were scared of it, of me, and they wanted to control it but they couldn’t and then it got so cold-_

_I don’t always realize what I’m doing._

_-his Cryo-Unit was still hooked up to the grid_

_He was screaming-_

_I don’t think I’m real._

_-must’ve forgotten about him._

_-oh god it hurts-_

_Just a bit cold._

_-it was hurting him…_

_Make it stop, please, make it stop._

  
  


Bucky had done nothing to stop this.

  


Bucky had to save him.

 

********

 

“This isn’t going to be easy.”

Bucky was leaning against the railing, staring out at the horizon on one of Stark’s balconies. He had heard Nat open the sliding glass door and step out, but figured she would speak up whether he acknowledged her or not. She knew he had heard her.

“I know.”

She walked forward until she was leaning on the railing next to him.

“It’s a lot to risk for one person.”

Bucky clenched his jaw. He knew what she was doing. She was trying to get him to let out his guilt over the situation before the mission. That way it was less likely to distract him and get someone hurt.

“I know.”

She turned to face him, still leaning on one elbow. The wind pushed her hair into her face. He watched it out of the corner of his eye.

“You love him, don’t you.”

It wasn’t a question.

Bucky lowered his head.

 

It was true. He didn’t know when, or how, but somewhere along the line it became true. This was so much more than trying to help a friend.

“Yeah,” he whispered. It got lost in the wind.

“We’ll get him, James. Don’t doubt that. Just remember that this is a whole lot bigger than we thought. Don’t lose sight of what else is at risk.”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. He just kept staring out at the city, watching the buildings light up as the sun set.

Natasha walked back inside. Bucky continued to stand on the balcony.

He tried not to think about what would happen After.

 

********

 

To say Bucky was nervous would be an understatement. He was a professional, he knew what he was doing. But this was different from one-man raids on terrorist cells, or infiltrating international crime syndicates with Natasha. This was SHIELD, the people he worked with and trusted to have his back on and off the field.

This was Steve.

But Bucky Barnes was a goddamned professional, so he didn’t let any of it show.

It was 11:30. Stark was going to barge into the Triskelion anytime now and cause a ruckus. At 12:00 he would shut down all of the security, elevators, and lights on the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth floor. He would pretend to be surprised, make a comment about how lucky SHIELD was that he was around to fix it, and stall for as long as possible. Bucky and Natasha had to be in position before that happened.

After that, it was up to him and Nat to take out the lab techs, find Steve, and get him out of there as quietly as possible.

Stark was going to talk to Fury, give him everything they had on HYDRA, and hope the Director was feeling generous enough to help them.

There was practically no chance Fury was HYDRA. Putting the fact that HYDRA was a Nazi organization aside, it just didn’t make sense. All of the files they had found were either too insignificant for the Director of SHIELD to be bothered with, or had been carefully hidden from him. Plus, Fury wasn’t one to play second fiddle to anyone and it was pretty clear Pierce was running the show.

So after they convinced Fury to help, the plan was to get the hell out, get back to the Avengers Tower, and have drinks on Stark.

 

Chances were, nothing would go as smoothly as they had planned but they were all highly capable field agents who could handle themselves should anything go wrong (except for Stark, but he’s a superhero so that had to count for something).

Bucky was in the lobby doing his best to look like he was supposed to be there as someone dramatically swung open the glass doors. A loud, obnoxious voice filled the room and Bucky walked to the elevators and hit the button for the fifteenth floor.

That was his cue. Stark was here, so he had to meet Natasha on the floor above Steve. There, they would suit up and run over the plan once more, connect their comms to Stark’s, and wait until he shut down the security system so they could slip through the air vents to the floor below.

Natasha was already in her Widow suit by the time he got to her. She had her weapons laid out and was already preparing for the mission.

Bucky pulled on his uniform as well. They both strapped their weapons on, guns in holsters, knives in sheaths, and Nat’s Widow Bites on her wrists.

She handed him a small, clear earpiece, which he put on, and equipped a matching one of her own.

“Widow checking in,” she said, checking that the channel that Stark had put them on was clear.

The delay from when she talked to when his comm relayed it was slightly distracting, but nothing major.

“Soldier checking in, line clear,” he responded.

“How’re my favorite deadly spies?” Stark’s voice was loud and unexpected in his ear.

Bucky and Natasha shared a look. She rolled her eyes.

“Soldier and Widow in position. Waiting for your mark,” he responded.

Stark confirmed and the line went quiet. Bucky focused on taking deep breaths, trying to get himself in the right headspace for what he had to do. He didn’t need to look to know Natasha was doing the same. They both had their pre-mission rituals, and had worked together long enough to know each other’s.

Bucky liked quiet so he could focus on his breathing. He let his mind go blank so he could focus on the mission, and nothing else.

Natasha liked stillness. Bucky wasn’t quite sure why, but he thought it had something to do with how she was trained. She would sit and not move a single muscle. Her face was blank, her posture stiff, right up until it was time to move out. Then, she was nothing but controlled violence and deadly grace.

 

A few minutes later the lights all shut off. The whole floor was plunged into darkness. He looked to the Widow, who nodded to him.

He went to the large grate in the upper corner of the room, one of the reasons they had chosen this place to meet. The large air duct was directly connected with the floor below, making it the perfect place to go through.

He boosted her up, and she helped pull him in. She took the lead as they crawled through.

His mind was blank as he followed her through the tight space. He was focused solely on the task at hand. Thinking about what was at stake and how it could go wrong was a distraction he couldn’t afford.

When they reached their destination, Romanoff removed another grate on their right and silently dropped down into the dark hallway.

It was empty.

They had prepared for at least _some_ activity, the medical floor should have had at least some staff and patients, but it looked like that wasn’t the case.

Bucky glanced at Widow before slipping his M9 out of it’s holster and taking point to move ahead. The area where Steve was being kept, according to Stark, was almost in the middle of the building.

“He should be on our left in about fifty feet. I move in first, you stay out here just in case something goes wrong. I’ll leave my comm on so you can hear what’s happening,” he muttered to Natasha as he carefully stalked forward. She nodded and he switched his earpiece to constant transmission.

It meant he wouldn’t be able to receive anything from Natasha or Stark, but it had been decided that this was the best way to make sure everything went to plan, and if it didn’t, it was the best way to work around it.

They both stood on either side of the completely inconspicuous door. It looked like every other one they had passed on their way here.

Natasha silently counted down with her fingers. At one, she opened the door and Bucky slipped inside.

He was met with a moment of déjà vu, recalling the mission that had started everything, but quickly focused back to the task at hand.

The door shut behind him with a ‘click’. Despite the separation, he still took comfort in the fact that Natasha was right there to provide backup if needed.

All of the sudden, the lights in the room flickered back on. He was winced as his eyes adjusted. He blinked to clear his vision, and his stomach dropped.

“I told you stay out of this, Barnes.”

Pierce stood in the middle of the large room. Rumlow and some of his Strike goons were flanking him, a clear threat. Behind them were three doctors who were fussing over machines attached to a figure strapped down to a gurney.

Bucky’s grip on his handgun tightened. He didn’t respond.

“Drop your weapons,” Rumlow growled, raising his rifle.

Bucky didn’t move. He kept glancing between the medical gurney and the agents in front of him, trying to figure out a way to get past them relatively unscathed.

Pierce narrowed his eyes.

“I said drop them!” Rumlow repeated, the sight of his rifle still trained on Bucky’s head. Bucky held both his hands up and carefully lowered his M9 to the ground.

“Get rid of the rest, too,” he ordered. Bucky set to disarming himself of all the visible weapons he had. Rumlow jerked his head at one of his agent and then to him. “Check him.”

Bucky was roughly patted down. Pierce just watched with a smug look on his face, the bastard.

Rollins found his ankle gun and four more combat knives.

Bucky still had one compact knife left, attached to the small of his back.

Pierce took a step forward. Bucky lowered his arms to his sides. He met Pierce’s gaze head on.

“I thought I was affording you a kindness by letting you off with a warning, but it’s clear I was mistaken.”

Bucky clenched his jaw.

“Did you really think you would be able to walk out of here with the greatest scientific achievement of the last century?” Pierce scoffed.

“His name is Steve.”

Pierce paused for a moment, looking put off, before continuing as if Bucky hadn’t spoken at all. “You think I would just let you and Romanoff take the greatest asset SHIELD has ever had, that the SSR ever created?”

“His name is Steve,” Bucky repeated, glaring at him. Pierce raised his voice and continued.

“Being able to harness these abilities would mean SHIELD has the tools to instate the kind order the world needs, they just threw them away, but I know what they can do, what can be accomplished, and you thought that I would let you jeopardize that?”

“His name is Steve!” Bucky shouted, fed up with Pierce’s monologuing.

The Strike Team jolted at the outburst and retrained their sights on him. The doctors, who had been fiddling with the machines and paying little mind to the rest of the room, froze.

“...Bucky?” a familiar voice groaned.

Everyone looked at Steve where he was secured to the gurney. Parts of his head were shorn and had visible scars. He was hooked up to an IV. There were nodes attached all over his body with wires that led to the machines. He was squinting up at the light. He went to sit up, but was held down by the metal straps.

“Steve?” Bucky choked out. The doctors looked extremely shocked. The Strike Team looked unsure as to who they should be focusing on.

“Buck?”

“Barnes,” Pierce started in a warm, indulgent voice. “I know that you’ve formed some sort of… attachment, but believe me when I say that this is for the best. It’s too dangerous to let that kind of power go unchecked. You’ve seen what he can do, but if SHIELD could control it-”

“You mean HYDRA,” Bucky interrupted.

He got immense satisfaction from the look on Pierce’s face.

“I know, Pierce. I know everything, and so does Stark and Agent Romanoff. I know HYDRA’s infiltrated SHIELD, and I know you’re their leader.”

There was no response, so Bucky smirked.

“I know that as we speak, Stark is showing Director Fury everything we’ve dug up on you and your friends here,” he motioned to the Strike Team and the medical staff, “and I know he that isn’t going to be thrilled when he finds out.

“And I know,” Bucky bared his teeth in a mockery of a grin, “that the Black Widow is standing by to release everything we’ve found online.”

He boldly took a step forward. Weapons were still aimed directly at him, but no one made the move to fire.

“How do you think SHIELD agents are going to take being played by HYDRA? What about the public? What do you think your World Security Council will do when they see you for the lying snake you are?”

Pierce stared at him before he moved. In a single motion, the man pulled Rumlow’s pistol from its holster, turned the safety off, and hovered his finger over the trigger.

But he wasn’t pointing it at Bucky.

Bucky froze. Pierce smirked.

“You played your hand, Agent Barnes, but I still haven’t played mine. It’s not as if all these months have been for nothing. Significant progress has been made on Project Rebirth. We may not be able to control your friend here, at least not yet, but we are able to… guide him.

“Insight protocol, now!” he ordered one of the doctors.

“But Sir, Insight is still experimental, tests so far have been extremely inconsistent and it only amplifies the patient’s-”

“That was an order.”

The doctor looked at Pierce and nodded. They both set to work on their separate machines. Bucky could hear a whirring sound, some sort of powering up sequence. Then the first doctor flipped a switch.

Steve screamed.

Bucky started to run over to him, but Rumlow shoving the barrel of his rifle against Bucky’s chest stopped him in his tracks.

Steve convulsed on the gurney, his body slamming against the metal bands that held him down.

“Steve!” Bucky shouted, desperate to do something, _anything_ , but he was completely helpless.

The lights started to flicker.

The gurney started to shake.

Steve’s screaming only got louder.

Everyone in the room except for Bucky was thrown against the wall. They fell to the ground, unmoving. A shiver ran up Bucky’s spine. Bucky’s breath formed wisps of clouds in the air in front of him.

Bucky’s eyes widened when Steve- Steve as Bucky had been seeing him this whole time- appeared in the middle of the room.

Bucky’s throat was dry. He couldn’t get enough breath. Steve’s eyes fell on him.

“Bucky? What’s going on?” he looked around to see the mess he had caused. He saw his own body and his eyes went slack with shock and confusion.

“Is that… me?” he whispered. “I don’t understand.” Steve’s voice began to rise. “What’s happening?”

Bucky started to carefully tread toward him. His fingers felt numb as he reached for the other man. “Steve…”

Steve whirled around to face him. “Is that me?” he demanded.

Bucky floundered for a reasonable explanation before giving up.

“Yes,” he confirmed.

Steve walked toward his body. His eyes were glazed over. His face was dumbstruck as he took in the convulsing figure. Bucky had no idea what was running through Steve’s head.

“That’s… me,” Steve’s hands hovered over his body. “What’s happening to me? Why am I-”

He looked at the machines surrounding his body. He flinched away and stumbled back.

“I can’t feel it, why can’t I feel it? I don’t feel anything. Why can’t I feel anything? All I feel is the cold and the ice and the burning and- and-”

Steve was frantic. He took a shaky step forward, then another, until he was once again right next to his writhing body.

Bucky could only watch, frozen in place.

Steve’s apparition touched his hand.

Steve disappeared.

Bucky cried out for him.

In all the commotion, Bucky hadn’t noticed Pierce pushing himself up and struggling to his feet with Rumlow’s gun still in his grip.

“ _Hail HYDRA_.”

 

Pierce fired.

  


Bucky screamed.

  
  


Steve woke up.

  
  


Later, Bucky would ask why Nat hadn’t come in to provide backup. Later, he’d learn that Pierce had managed to put all the doors on that floor into lockdown mode. He’d hear about how Stark managed to convince Fury of their case and how Fury managed to, slowly and quietly, track down every HYDRA agent he could and… dispose of them.

Later, Natasha would tell him what it looked like when the door to the medical room had suddenly unlocked and she rushed inside just in time to see Bucky go down. To see Steve rip apart the metal restraints holding him down. To see the nodes attached to Steve’s body detach all at once, to see the machines he had been hooked up to crumple like paper. To see Steve, in his body, hovering a foot above the ground as he moved to the middle of the room. To see his hands and arms bleed from where the IV and medication drips had been attached.

Just in time to watch as Steve ripped the tile off the floor and ceiling, to watch him tear apart the drywall and have it all swirling violently around him as he stared down at Pierce with single-minded intent.

Just in time to watch as Pierce was raised into the air, choking and sputtering, until he was level with Steve.

Just in time to watch Steve drop Pierce to the ground with a _thud_. To watch as Pierce opened his mouth to beg when he tried to lift himself up. To watch as he collapsed before he could get out a single word. Later, his cause of death would be reported as internal decapitation.

Later, Bucky would worry about the aftermath of all that had occurred. He would worry about HYDRA in various world governments, he would worry about rebuilding the remains of SHIELD and he would worry about rebuilding his life, this time (hopefully) with Steve.

For now, Bucky sat in the uncomfortable plastic chair next to Steve’s hospital bed, the gunshot wound in his shoulder wrapped with gauze and his arm in a sling, reading the Harry Potter series out loud to an in-and-out-of-consciousness Steve, glad to be able to hold his hand without having to worry about it disappearing at any moment.

For now, Bucky sat in the hospital with Steve and thought about what later would bring.

  
  


Epilogue:

Steve was anxious. The air around him hummed with nervous energy. Six months ago his anxiety would be uprooting the plants in the yard and breaking the sprinkler system, completely out of his control, but not now.

Bucky straightened out Steve’s shirt collar. Steve gave him a distracted smile and a mutter of “thanks”.

Bucky smoothed out the blond’s jacket, then brought his hands up to Steve’s shoulders.

“Are you sure about this? You don’t have to do this right now. Just say the word and we’ll get out of these stuffy clothes and stay in bed all day. I’ll even let you choose the first movie.”

Bucky was nervous too, not that he’d ever admit it. It had been a year since he, Stark, and Nat had rescued Steve and revealed HYDRA to the world. A long, long year full of hearings and testimonies and Steve.

Steve. Steve, who was here with him. Steve, with whom he shared a home with. Steve, who had gone through so much and was still here, looking up at Bucky with so much trust in his eyes that it took his breath away.

“What’re you lookin’ at, you dope?” Steve asked. Bucky realized he had been staring at Steve with what had to be a pathetically adoring look on his face. He didn’t turn away.

“Just some punk I know,” Bucky answered easily, nudging Steve with his elbow. Steve beamed up at him, anxiety momentarily forgotten. They stood there facing each other for a moment before Bucky’s expression fell as he came back to reality.

“Seriously though,” Bucky said soberly. “We can get back in the car and drive home, they’ll understand. We have all the time in the world.”

Steve squared his shoulders. “No,” he said firmly. “I don’t wanna wait any longer. We’re- it’s not illegal anymore. We don’t hafta hide.”

In that moment, with Steve sticking out his jaw with a stubborn look in his eyes, Bucky fell a little bit more in love with the man standing in front of him. Everyday he discovered more and more things for him to love about Steve.

“Plus,” Steve looked back up to Bucky’s face “they’re your family. I wanna meet them. They love you and they are an important part of your life. Meeting them is important to you and therefore it is important to me.”

Bucky was once again struck by how far Steve had come in just a year.

A year ago he had been terrified of his feelings, and especially of anyone finding out. He had struggled to express his emotions verbally. He still struggled staying present, keeping his consciousness connected to his body. Separating the two was a defense mechanism he had developed to protect himself from what HYDRA had been doing to him. But, it was getting easier.

As Steve had started to remember more and more of his past, he had found it harder and harder to project himself away from his body. That was why he had moments where he lost control of his powers, because his mind was getting sensory input from the torture that his body was being put through. That was why it happened more and more often as he learned and remembered more and more about himself.

But that hardly happened anymore, and they both knew what to do if it did.

So yes, Steve was still attending therapy twice a week, but he had come so far from where he was when he woke up in the hospital over twelve months ago. Bucky couldn’t see it as anything less than a testament to Steve’s strength that he had made it this far, and continued to make progress each day.

“Okay,” Bucky conceded. “But I’m warning you now, everything they tell you about me is a dirty lie.”

Steve laughed. The sound filled Bucky with happiness.

“Okay,” Steve repeated, grin still lighting up his face. He took Bucky’s hand- his left one because he loved all of Bucky, no matter what- and squeezed. “Let’s go.”

Bucky squeezed back. He started to lead them to the porch.

“I love you, Stevie,” he said before knocking. Steve’s cheek were dusted pink but his expression was still glowing with happiness.

“‘Till the end of the line.”

 

The End


End file.
